Shortage forces Akubra to import most rabbit pelts

Akubra has been
made to import most of its hats’ key component – rabbit fur – due to a shortage
in local supply.

ABC’s
Landline reported yesterday that it has been harder for the iconic Australian hat maker to keep production going
using local rabbits, whose numbers have been decimated by the Calicivirus.

"Rabbit fur is the best fur to make
our hats out of, and the rabbit industry in the '40s and '50s was absolutely
enormous, wild rabbits that is, there was no farmed rabbits in those days," the company’s managing director told the ABC.

In an
interview with Manufacturers’ Monthly last year, Akubra’s company secretary and
director Roy Wilkinson estimated that
the hat maker would use the fur from about 2.5 million rabbits in 2013. The
fourth-generation family company uses the pelts of about a dozen rabbits to make one
hat.

Calicivirus,
introduced in the 1990s, has killed off a great deal of the Australian rabbit
population and there are now few suppliers remaining.

"In the areas where it's been most
effective - which is in the arid and semi-arid regions of Australia - it has
reduced rabbit populations by 90 per cent," Griffith University
ecologist Hamish McCallum told Landline.

Keir said that Akubra is now importing
65-70 per cent of the fur it uses, with local quality low and cost high. Akbura's biggest international supplier is Ukraine, currently suffering political
unrest.

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